We Conserve — the campuswide program aimed at slashing energy consumption by 20 percent by 2010 and building an environmental ethic — will celebrate its achievements in a series of events beginning with a concert on Friday, Sept. 26.

The concert, from 7:30 p.m. until midnight at the Memorial Union Terrace, will feature four bands and emphasize the environmental accomplishments of the program.

“Working together since April 2006, we have identified campus energy savings totaling about $4.6 million, and we’re on our way to meet and exceed our conservation goals,” says Faramarz Vakili, associate director of physical plant and leader of the effort.

The savings result from a variety of improvements and changes being implemented as part of the initiative, as well as individual energy-savings habits being promoted as part of We Conserve.

Read the full release here.

It can’t move like R2-D2 or C-3PO, but the world’s only biomass analysis robot, iWall, may help researchers in the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) at Michigan State University create biofuels more quickly and efficiently.

Markus Pauly (right), explains how the iWall works to Gov. Jennifer Granholm (center) and MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon at the GLBRC open house on Sept. 12.

The robot showed off its biomass grinding and dispensing skills to Gov. Granholm and MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon at the GLBRC open house on Sept. 12 in the MSU Conservatory.

iWall was designed and built to the specifications of Markus Pauly, MSU associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, by Labman Automation, a British company. Pauly, who leads the GLBRC analytic service group, studies plant cell walls and how they can be manipulated so they’re easier to break down and convert into biofuels. (more…)

A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has developed a process that creates transportation fuel from plant material.

The alternative fuels developed by UW chemical and biological engineering professor James Dumesic and his team look a lot like the gasoline and diesel fuel used in vehicles today. That’s because the new fuels are identical at the molecular level to their petroleum-based counterparts. The only difference is where they come from.

A paper published in the Sept. 18 online version of the journal Science explains how they convert sugar into molecules that can be efficiently upgraded into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy and is being published Thursday in the online version of the journal Science.

Many researchers have been focusing on trying to use nonedible materials instead of corn to make ethanol. They work with sugar materials from agricultural waste, corn leaves and stalks, switchgrass and forest residue. But instead of converting the water-soluble sugars derived from the cell walls of plants to ethanol, the new UW process could be used to convert sugars directly into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel components, Dumesic said. (more…)

Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle said Tuesday that more than $7 million in financial aid is being awarded to Wisconsin firms to help finance research, development and commercialization or adoption of new renewable energy technologies.

The awards include $1 million to Virent Energy Inc. of Madison, which will use the mix of grant and loan funds to design, build, and operate a pilot production plant capable of producing up to 10,000 gallons of gasoline per year from carbohydrates in biomass.

The funds from the Wisconsin Energy Independence Fund require a 50 percent match. The awards will leverage $44.2 million in investments and create new jobs for Wisconsin families on farms, in forests, in research labs and for manufacturers, Doyle said. (more…)

The series runs for 10 weeks from Sept 24 to November 26;  contact Tom Zinnen at zinnen@biotech.wisc.edu to sign up for a Wednesday convenient for you, or to suggest a colleague who might be enjoy the opportunity of presenting at Frontiers in Life Sciences.

Thomas Friedman is a man bent on revolution. In his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist writes about the need for a green revolution — and calls upon Americans to lead the charge.

Friedman argues that the U.S. can help revive itself at home and abroad by finding solutions to global warming.

Friedman is a foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times. His other books include From Beirut to Jerusalem and The World is Flat

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The city of Austin, Tex., approved plans on Thursday for a huge plant that will burn waste wood to make electricity, the latest sign of rising interest in a long-dormant form of renewable energy.

When completed in 2012, the East Texas plant will be able to generate 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 75,000 homes. That is small by the standards of coal-fired power plants, but plants fueled by wood chips, straw and the like — organic materials collectively known as biomass — have rarely achieved such scale.

Austin Energy, a city-owned utility, has struck a $2.3 billion, 20-year deal to be the sole purchaser of electricity from Nacogdoches Power, the company that will build the plant for an undisclosed sum. On Thursday, Austin’s City Council unanimously approved the deal, which would bring the Austin utility closer to its goal of getting 30 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020.

“We saw this plant as very important because it gives us a diversity of fuels,” said Roger Duncan, general manager of Austin Energy. “Unlike solar and wind, we can run this plant night or day, summer or winter.”

Biomass can save the world or so we are told. The twin specters of looming energy shortages emptying our wallets and global warming melting glaciers make finding a solution for our petroleum addiction urgent from both a financial and environmental perspective. However, there is a cost to producing and converting biomass into fuels and electricity.

Removing too much biomass can deplete nutrients from the soil and possibly increase erosion. Landowners, farmers, loggers and other people involved in the production and harvest of biomass need to be compensated and the price of biomass needs to cover those costs. Researchers from Minnesota and Wisconsin zeroed in on one particular system—small trees and undergrowth in the Superior National Forest—to gauge the environmental and economic costs of removing biomass from the forest.

Read the rest of the article here.

Michigan State University scientists have identified a protein required for photosynthesis that could ultimately lead to plants designed for biofuel production.

Professor Christoph Benning and other MSU researchers discovered the protein that is necessary for development of chloroplasts — the machinery of photosynthesis, which uses light and energy to convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrates for plant food and oxygen.

Read the rest of the article here.

In this segment, Ira Flatow talks with ethanol biofuel advocate David Blume about common misconceptions about the use of ethanol for fuel, and about Blume’s vision for decentralized, community supported ethanol production in the US. Could a neighborhood ethanol distillery be in your future?

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